How to UNLOCK Greatness Fast | Mentorship Training That Rewires Your Mind

Mentorship is not something you ask somebody to do.

So look for mentors who don't necessarily give you answers.

I, for years, read books of people who I didn't know, but I considered them as my personal mentors.

What's up, Believe Nation? It's Evan. My one word is believe, and I believe in you. I believe you have an amazing gift inside you that I want to see exploded onto the world. Now I started the One Rule series because we do a lot of top 10s and there's a lot of rules that come up over and over and over again, and the One Rule series smushes the most popular rules together into one super clip for you. So today we're gonna learn how you can find mentors. Enjoy!

Here's what I've learned about mentorship. Mentorship is not something you ask somebody to do, like, "Will you be my friend?" It doesn't work like that. When you find somebody you get along with, you share values, you share beliefs, you spend time with them, you get to know them, you develop trust, you take— you're vulnerable with them, you open up to them, and you discover that you become friends. It's what happens. You start off as simply acquaintances. In my experience, mentorship is exactly the same. There were people who were much more experienced than me who had wisdom that I that I didn't have, and when I would call them, they would take my calls. And when I would ask them questions, they would always take the time to give me answers. And over the course of time, they became my mentors, like they became my friends. And I remember one time I was with one of my mentors, Ron Bruder, an amazing guy, and I was leaving his house and I put my arm around him and I said, "You know, I'm glad you're my mentor." And he looked at me and he said, "I'm glad you're mine." and it caught me completely off guard. And true mentorship, like true friendship, is not a one-way street. It's not about one person only giving advice to the other. Both people are showing up to give, and both people are showing up to learn. But you can't ask someone to be your mentor, especially someone who's a total stranger, knock on their door and say, "Will you be my mentor?" if they don't know you and you've never met them. It's like friendship. You cultivate a relationship, and if that person is always there for you and wants to see you thrive and succeed and believes in you, then perhaps they will become your mentor, like making a friend.

You've mentioned that you've been lucky enough to have mentors in your life, such as Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, Arianna Huffington, Jony Ive of Apple.

I'm notorious for just cold-calling people, man. I just pick up the phone, call them up, and let's just talk. You know, there's nothing in particular. I just want to talk and just, you know, explain to me how you see your business, you know, how do you operate the business. You know, Johnny Ives in particular, I mean, it's just fascinating, his process of creating design. And when I was playing, I used to— when I did that, I used to try to connect the dots between how John Williams would compose a score for a film or Johnny Ives would design new Apple product, and how does that connect to how I play the game of basketball? Is there something there that I can learn that can be used when I step out here on the court? I mean, there's lessons that surround us. I mean, life is basically a library. You know, all we need to do is just open our eyes and look and ask and read accordingly.

So is that something you were doing? You were building those relationships even outside of your interest as a businessman, really even as an athlete and a basketball player? Yeah, I mean, it's the curiosity.

I think the curiosity is the most important thing. I mean, it's, you know, it sounds really weird to say, but you mean like leadership lessons? You know, I learned leadership lessons just from walking in the park and just observing nature and the sun's relationship with nature and relationship with the moon and the sun understanding when to be present and when to go away, right? Because as a teammate, it was like, dude, the sun's out all damn long. You're going to sunburn a hell of a lot of people. So if I'm playing this game and I'm on top of my guys for 48 minutes, dude, you're going to sunburn every single teammate there. So there's certain times where it's important for the sun to be present, and sometimes it needs to go away. But there are life lessons that surround us at all times, and I've always been extremely, extremely curious about those things.

Very frequently we'll ask someone, for instance, what advice would you give to a 30-year-old just getting started in your industry? What is the best advice you would give? And just as important, I think you should ask, what advice should that person ignore? Or what is the worst advice that you hear repeated often in your industry? What is the conventional wisdom that you disagree with? Those type of questions give you a not-to-do list, and it is what you don't do that provides the space for what you can do. Anyone who says, "You should do this the way I did it," without any caveats, should be maybe ignored in many cases, but certainly viewed with suspicion. The type of mentors who tend to be the most helpful are those who don't necessarily give you an answer, but they give you a better way of finding that answer. "I'm leaving my second job, I want to start my own company, what should I do?" And they say, well, I can't tell you what you should do because I don't have enough information, which is a huge credibility point in my mind that they have the awareness to say that. And they said, but if I were in your position, here's how I might think through it. So look for mentors who don't necessarily give you answers, but who walk you through the process of how they might think about making the proper decision given all all of your particulars. And I think that's what, in my experience, separates a mediocre or decent mentor from a great mentor.

You have with you on some— you had with you on this Larry Moss, who was a great acting coach. Terrific.

Absolutely.

And as good as you are, and knowing yourself as well as you do, what does someone like that bring to you in a moment like this?

Knowledge. Knowledge. And also, uh, you know, uh, support. Absolutely. When you go into new areas, you know, you like to be mentored in certain ways. I mean, I'm not too old for a mentor, and he certainly did that.

You never get too old for a mentor.

Absolutely not. You know, I think it's— you never get too old to learn something new. And when Frank came to my house and he said, "Jim, I know you're a home run hitter, but now you have to learn a new swing." And I said, you know—

Meaning not swinging for the fence, perhaps, in a baseball metaphor?

Not necessarily. Swinging— doing the sacrifice fly, or, you know, whatever. Whatever you have to to do. And, and I was just too game. I was, I was into it. I love it. I love, I love the idea that at my age I can learn something new and go into a different area.

And what do you say to someone who are saying, oh, nobody around me are believing in me?

And that's okay. If you have that, that's great. If you don't have it, yeah, it's okay. I for years read books of people who I didn't know, but I considered them as my personal mentors. I, yeah, I studied Winston Winston Churchill, who said, "The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but at the end, there it is." I studied Earl Nightingale, who said, "All of us get in life what we are, not what we want. All of us are self-made, but only the successful will admit it." So I studied these people and they mentored me. I feel their spirits. I surrounded myself in my bed with their books.

In your books many days.

And their audio, and my imagination, and listening to their audio programs. Yes. So how much does a library card cost? It's free in the United States. I don't know what it is in your country. So I suggest that you spend time working on yourself. Study the high achievers. I did that to find out how did they get there. I studied the life of Frederick Douglass, who said, "We won't get everything that we fight for, but everything we get, it will be a fight." And so as you study these people, and imagine yourself in their position. And in your mind's eye, say to yourself, as I did, if they can do it, I can do it. They put their pants on one leg at a time. They breathe air just as I do. And so I believe that what you focus on the longest becomes the strongest. What we think about, we bring about. When you train your mind to serve you by reading a minimum of 20 to 60 pages a day, listening to audio programs, writing goals down, reaching— reading them 3 times a day. You're literally creating a new mental blueprint and imagining and seeing yourself already living from the goal. You begin to do some things that most people look at and see as magical. You had an early meeting with Dino De Laurentiis and it didn't go so well.

Well, that was different because Dino De Laurentiis had an office and he wanted me to be in dark Dark Savage. And he wanted me to play the villain in Dark Savage. And I walked in and I always kind of have a mouth that sometimes goes a little bit too fast and I step on myself. I walked into the office and I saw Dino standing behind his desk. And it was this huge desk, ornate, gold and kind of like French looking or Italian looking. I don't know what, but it was gigantic. It was one of those partner desks, right? And Dino, the only thing that stood out was kind of his chest and his head because he's a little guy. Dino's a really short guy. So I looked in, I walked in his office and I looked in and I says, "Hi, Dino. Why does a little guy like you need such a big desk?" And to Dino De Laurentiis, you never say you're little. Because he saw himself as a giant. So he looked at me and he says, "Ah, a Schwarzenegger. You have an accent. I cannot use you. Ah." And I said, again, stupidly, "Who is talking about having an accent? I mean, listen to you." "Ah, you are a Nazi. Ah." You know, and he walked away because I had a German accent. So that was the end of that. So I left the office and my agent came up to me, grabbed me really forcefully by my arm, and he said to me, he says, "I have been an agent for 15 years. This meeting was exactly 1 minute and 14 seconds. It was the shortest meeting we have ever had. You just fucked everything up. Goddamn it, it took me months to get in here." So he was mad at me also. So anyway, so that's how the relationship started with Dina. But then when he bought Conan, he came to Spain where we were shooting, and the third day of filming, after he saw the dailies, the footage that we filmed, he came up to me and he said, Schwarzenegger, you are Conan.

Ah!

And he walked off. And Milius came to me, the director, and he says, this is the greatest compliment that you can ever get. He said you're Conan. Isn't that great? And I said, yeah, I guess so. And from that point on, we created this really great relationship, and we did movies together. And the Raw Deal and then Red Sonja and Conan the Destroyer and Conan the Barbarian. And he became kind of like a father figure. He became kind of the Reg Park that I had in the bodybuilding world and Joe Weider. He became that character in the movie world that I could go to for anything, who would give me advice, who always had wonderful compliments and kind of took me in as part of his family. And so that's why I always will miss him very dearly after he passed away.

I'm a big believer in mentorship. One, in terms of, you know, face-to-face people that you can go and learn from. And two, from what I call aspirational mentors, people who've done a lot more than you, who you may never meet, who may have passed on, but you can still learn from their success. It comes from the core understanding that whatever challenge you have in front of you right now, somebody else has already solved it. Whatever big problem you're facing in your life or in your business, somebody has already solved it, and you don't need to come up with every ingenious solution yourself. This is one of the things that saved my first business. One of the two most important lessons that I've ever learned in my life was whenever I don't know what to do, whenever I have a big problem, I don't have the answer, I look for somebody who has already solved it, and I try to learn from their lessons. In my first business, I had a software company. I was struggling, you know, making $300 a month, barely able to survive. And I was just trying to come up with all these ideas myself, like, okay, how about we do this? How about we do this?

How about we do this?

And nothing was working. And I told my partner I quit, and it was the worst day of my life. And when I woke up the next day, I realized I didn't want to quit. I just couldn't keep going the way I was going. And the lightbulb moment was I realized I'm not the first guy to try to sell software before. Maybe our specific kind of software Yes, but in general, other people have figured out how to sell software and make lots of money and target lots of customers. How did they do it? And I looked at Bill Gates and how he got started, and that started the process to me being able to build a real company. And that lesson that I learned at 19 years old has stayed true for the past almost 20 years, where every time I don't know what to do, I look at who can I model. It's, it's why the name of this channel is modeling the masters. It's why I try to showcase lots of different successful people from all walks of life, because you can learn from them. I'm learning from them. Is there any one director who you kind of linked into as your idea of how to direct, or is it just a combination of all these different great people?

You take things, I think, from everybody, you know. You kind of see what would work for you and what wouldn't. And honestly, I've— you know, there's so many gifted people But Bennett Miller, who I made Moneyball with, is a producer, so he's someone who's guiding me a lot. And Spike Jonze and I wrote a play together and are friends, and he's helped me a lot along the way, you know, very generously. And, you know, I just try and think of the things that I thought were really great about different directors that I worked with and what I liked to hear as an actor and, you know, try and give that to the people that I'm working with. Most filmmakers I've worked with, like, get notes from other filmmakers or notes from people who have done it. I always will ask, like, in life, if I have like a problem, I'd call someone who's older, who's been through it and done it like well, and from my eyes, so you ask their advice, right? So I got to imagine, and I know for a fact a lot of times that filmmakers show their movies and their scripts to, you know, people they respect to get thoughts because I don't think anyone's an island. I don't know, maybe like the only person I imagine who I've worked with who's probably like that, and I don't know at all, I'm just literally speculating as a fan, is Tarantino seems to like just create these things and then, you know, like he has these like magical screenplays. I don't know, but I don't know, maybe he has people he leans on or asks for advice. I have no idea, you know.

That man on the left, Roland Henning. Taught me why I cook. He was my mentor. He's my mentor today. Mentorship is such an important part of success. We continue to mentor our staff. We assign mentors. We ask you who you want your mentor to be. It's a process that we embrace wholeheartedly.

I started making music back in 2012-ish. I was looking for new music because I was tired of the mainstream stuff. I wanted to find something else I would actually like and enjoy and listen to. I discovered this YouTuber who went by the name DDNUS. I decided to leave a comment on his YouTube video because I'm very interested in learning how those things actually work, how do people make what we listen to or we use, like, for example, website graphics, music. And therefore, I was very interested in, like, how did he do it? Then we started to get in touch even more and more, and then he started teaching me the basics of music production.

Now I've got a special bonus mentorship clip from Dan Peña that you guys are gonna love. But before that, the question of the day is, I want to know who has been your biggest virtual mentor, somebody you've never met but who you look up to or who you've learned a lot from? Leave it down in the comments below. I'm curious to find out. Thank you guys so much for watching. I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is. Much love. I'll see you soon and enjoy the bonus.

The system that I've seen that works, which is very much contrary to all the other success guys, which I don't consider myself, is the mentorship where somebody mentors you. So you find somebody that is where you want to be and has accomplished all this, either man or woman, and then you find them and you come to them with your dream and your passion. And assuming the chemistry is right, and it's not always right, the rest is history. It's like the Tyson-Gus D'Amato deal, you know?

Yeah.

Okay. Tyson, by accident, with the greatest respect, Mike, found that guy when he was 13, 14 years old, when he was, you know, doing all kinds of ugly things, not dissimilar to myself about the same age. And Gus mentored him and tutored him. And then as that— and, you know, Mike will admit, I guess, I don't know, I've never talked to him about it, you know, when Gus died and all that stuff happened, he made some poor decisions. Made some very poor decisions. So you got to find that person, and you don't just— you're not just going to find them, you know, walking down the street on the High Street. I mean, you have to make a concerted effort to find somebody that you look up to, and normally that person is several years older than you, but they're successful in what you want to do.

Raise your standard.

Apple At the core, its core value is that we believe that people with passion can change the world for the better.

Not one drop of my self-worth depends on your acceptance of me.

I don't ever give up. I'd have to be dead or completely incapacitated.

Hey, Believe Nation, if you want to see my all-time favorite top 10 rules of success, I have a very special secret video for you. These are the individual clips that I have personally learned the most from and applied to my life and my business. Check the link in the description for details.